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Thursday, July 6, 2017

An Unusual Report Regarding Increasing Number of Exorcisms #Religion #Sociology

Christian exorcisms have seen an “astonishing” increase over the last few years, religious think tank Theos has said following the publication of a new report.The rise is in part driven by the growth of certain migrant communities and Pentecostal churches, for which the practice is common.

We will judge for ourselves whether the increase is astonishing but we can't do that when we don't get a hint of a damn number.

Maybe you have this figured out since Pentecostals are often on an extreme anyway and migrants are too dumb to know better, right?

It's more than that.

Exorcisms are often requested by churchgoers who believe they have been cursed or that they, their loved ones or their possessions have been taken over by a demon or evil spirit.Researchers are now worried that the Anglican Church is now embracing the practice and neglecting the mental health needs of its faithful.“There has been an increased focus in the Anglican Church on exorcisms, and partially that’s in response to increased demand. They have been getting more and more people calling them saying there's demand for this,” the report’s author, Ben Ryan, said.

- RT

So now it's the Anglican Church doing it.

Or it just comes from anywhere.

“Outside the established church, there’s a huge increase which you can see with your own eyes. If you walk down the Old Kent Road [in London] there are flyers and stickers everywhere.”

- RT

No chance of a #Science tag on this one as this lot is all over the place and there's nothing in the report which seems to amount to much more than hearsay.

Not surprisingly, the Church of England was heartily defensive.

A spokesman for the Church of England, however, assured the public it “takes deliverance ministry very seriously and treats each case in a pastoral and private way. Any case would be dealt with locally through the diocese.“Our guidelines state that particular caution needs to be exercised, especially when ministering to someone who is in a distressed or disturbed state.”

- RT

You know it's coming so let's deliver the payload since this report is bollocks from top to bottom.

They say the problem is astonishing large but give nothing in evidence to support that and then they go off to point at everywhere possible as sources of exorcism ... except the most obvious.

When we think of exorcism, probably most immediately think of the Catholic Church and maybe embellish the thought with ideas of demented rituals from the Middle Ages. Maybe you will even conjure up Linda Blair who pukes green stuff while her head spins around as the hapless priest realizes, man, I am so seriously screwed.

England hasn't been much friends with the Catholic Church ever since their Horrors of Henry show but there should have been at least a courtesy mention of the fact the Catholic Church where they do still support exorcism but they have a remarkably dispassionate view of it. Their exorcists are highly-trained in Catholicism and also Abnormal Psychology which means they go into every possible exorcism with the assumption it's being driven by mental illness rather than demons. They don't accept something as needing an exorcism until they have exhausted all other possibilities.

While I no longer have the citation, I read a report once about a Vatican Exorcist and I was highly surprised at the insight and sensitivity of it.

I am not a Catholic and was raised, as my ol' Mother cheerfully described us, as Happy Heathens. My theological knowledge has expanded quite a bit since that time but my philosophical perspective hasn't changed that much. In other words, I'm not defensive and the purpose for writing is we don't like bullshit science.

The report leaves the impression exorcisms increase all over the place, in astonishing numbers. They provide almost no evidence of that except some dodgy anecdotal reports from England which doesn't, as a country, much care for religion anyway.